There’s a line in the musical “Operation Mincemeat,” after one of the characters is outed as an aspiring screenwriter. Hoping to one day create a movie version of their wartime deception mission, he’s asked, incredulously, what could be worse than turning it into a film. “At least it’s not a bloody musical,” he replies.
Well, thank Harry, England and St. George that it is a musical, because “Operation Mincemeat” is amazingly well conceived as a stage spectacle. It takes a special kind of vision to read the real-life history of a World War II spy mission and see the seed of a West End farce with heart.
Impressively faithful to the facts of true historical Operation Mincemeat, the musical centers around characters at MI-5, the British spy agency. An Allied invasion of Sicily is on the horizon, to gain a foothold to retake mainland Europe. The spies hope to fool the Nazis into thinking the attack will come through Sardinia instead so that they will move troops out of Sicily and make it easier to take.
The spies devise a plan to put bogus communiqués about an attack on Sardinia in the hands of the Germans by stashing them in the briefcase of a dead airman who washes up on the Spanish coast. To execute the plan, they need a dead body, an invented identity with full documentation and an inconspicuous delivery.
The musical leans into the unlikelihood and audacity of the trickery, mining the ridiculousness for jokes and finding the caper in the historical event. Written and composed by the British troupe SpitLip, the show calls for just five actors who play all the roles. They wear black pants and white shirts and don coats, vests, glasses, mustaches and the like to identify their many changes of character.
The panache and coordination of the cast on these shifts rivals any door-slamming farce. Props and costume elements stashed behind moving set pieces appear like in a magic act, feats of timing performed with antic energy. Doors open in unexpected places (commented on by the characters in another meta moment) and the actors put on a whole new demeanor in an eyeblink. All this sparkling precision wows a live-theater audience, strongly making the case for the story as a bloody musical.
Each of the actors has a character they spend the most time portraying, with only two paired with characters of their own gender, and those roles are not played for drag comedy.
Courtesy of Matthew Murphy
As does the script, crammed full of rapid-fire lyrical cleverness and self-aware comedy. Many of the jokes come from the vaudeville or music-hall school, where a big, fat-pitch setup doesn’t make the payoff any less funny, as when the characters worry they’ve made a stupid mistake, and one beat later another enters saying, “You’ve made a stupid mistake.”
In the lyrics, some fabulous rhyming of Hamiltonian density would reward going to the show twice. “Look up victory in the diction’ry / there’s a picture there of me” typifies the verbose vibe, as does calling the cadaver at the center of the operation a “Trojan corpse.”
It’s also remarkable how nonchalantly the actors travel in and out of characters of different genders. Each of the actors has a character they spend the most time portraying, and the program identifies them with formulations such as “Ewen Montagu & others.” Of the five actors, only two are paired with characters of their own gender, and those roles are not played for drag comedy. The actor Katie Kleiger, for example, plays Montagu as a cocky British son of privilege, the sort of cad who skates through life knowing the rules don’t apply to him. She shows his charisma and old-boy arrogance not as dress-up, but by inhabiting the character.
Many of the musical’s jokes come from the vaudeville or music-hall school, where a big, fat-pitch setup doesn’t make the payoff any less funny.
Courtesy of Matthew Murphy
That sort of sophistication, not always aiming low, points to a surprising element of “Operation Mincemeat”: its heart. Another cross-gender performer, Luke Antony Neville depicting a matronly MI-5 employee named Hester Leggatt, delivers the song “Dear Bill” with an affecting touch. When the team decides that the invented identity of the corpse, William Martin, should have a letter from his sweetheart on him, Hester takes over the task after watching two others struggle with it. She solos, composing a letter with a-little-too-real level of detail pining for Bill’s return, with the lines “Why did we meet in the middle of a war / It’s a silly thing for anyone to do.” (One of the creators reported that they took those lines verbatim from the real-life letter.)
It’s a great moment, when you can see through to the personhood of the character onstage, not just a cog in a farcical machine but also a representation of someone who lived and loved, as best we can see them through all these years’ remove. Made all the more poignant by the song’s delivery in that unique way to that unique audience on that special night.
At least it’s not a bloody film.